I have been printing with my refurbished Sovol SV06 for almost two months now. It is tough to complain about a 3D printer at this price point, whether you are talking about the $169 I paid for my refurbished unit, or the $250 you have to pay for a brand new printer. The worst things I can say about it relate to how loud the fans on this printer can be.

Why is the Sovol SV06 so exciting? It is an open-source 3D printer that shares almost every feature with the Prusa MK3S+. If all you look at is the spec sheet, the Sovol SV06 seems to come out ahead in some ways, but you shouldn’t just look at the spec sheet.

Bender on the Sovol

The Sovol SV06 arrives at your door mostly assembled. It is separated into a few large components so it can be shipped in a reasonably sized box. If I am counting correctly in my head, you just have to drive in 11 screws to get the printer assembled. That is pretty good for a machine that is functionally equivalent to a Prusa MK3S+, especially when you consider that the box of parts you get when you order a Prusa MK3S+ kit costs three times as much.

This makes it challenging to directly compare the Sovol SV06 to either options for buying a Prusa MK3S+. The Sovol SV06 is 1/3 the price of the Prusa MK3S+ kit while being nearly as completely assembled as the $1,111.61 fully assembled Prusa MK3S+.

NOTE: I don’t know exactly how much you have to pay today. That $1,111,61 was the exact charge for my Prusa MK3S after shipping almost three years ago.

You get what you pay for

When you pay $750 for a Prusa MK3S+ kit or $1,111.61 for a fully-assembled Prusa MK3S, some portion of that money is going towards a customer service department. If you follow r/Sovol on Reddit, I wouldn’t blame you if you assumed that Sovol’s customer service department is one part-time employee that calls in sick most days.

Sovol is almost definitely using the cheapest parts that anyone can get there hands on. My Prusa MK3S is one of the quietest things in my office, and my podcasting mic barely picks it up when it is running. The Sovol’s power-supply fan sounds like a jet engine.

In some ways, though, you get more than you pay for. There are at least a dozen gorgeous injection-molded parts on the Sovol SV06. Almost every plastic part on the Prusa printers are 3D printed.

If you buy a printer from Prusa Research, it will almost definitely work. When you buy a Sovol SV06, you are definitely rolling the dice. We just don’t know the odds that they will ship us a dud of a printer.

I can almost print a clean 20-minute Benchy!

I am skipping ahead to the end, because it is I am excited about it! I ran the Sovol SV06 on the stock firmware up until a few days ago.

That’s when I installed Hillsoftware’s Marlin build, because it has support for Marlin’s input shaping. I don’t think I have tuned things correctly, and I am certain there is room to push my machine a little faster, but I did manage to print a Benchy in under 22 minutes.

I have upgraded the part-cooling fan on my Sovol SV06. I didn’t upgrade it to improve the cooling. I was hoping to make things a little quieter! That said, I do need that bigger 5015 fan to print a Benchy anywhere near this fast.

I have also upgraded my nozzle to a $2 0.6 mm CHT-style nozzle. This definitely violates the SpeedBoatRace rules. We will talk about the nozzle later.

I don’t have enough cooling to go any faster than this. My 21-minute Benchy is significantly cleaner when I point a giant fan across the printer. I also can’t print a clean 21-minute Benchy using Octoprint. The serial port isn’t fast enough!

I plan to continue using the input shaper. My fastest Benchy was printed with 5,000 mm/s^2 acceleration and speeds for perimeters and infill up at 160 mm/s. I have dialed that back to 4,000 mm/s^s and 140 mm/s, and that prints a pretty clean Benchy in just under 24 minutes via Octoprint.

This is a pretty good compromise for me. I can continue to use Octoprint. I can print way faster than I ever could before. I may not be winning any races, but that is fine by me.

I wouldn’t worry about any of this input-shaping nonsense if you are new to 3D printing and the Sovol SV06 is your first 3D printer. The faster you print, the more likely you are to have problems. You should spend some time getting your feet wet before you try to crank up the speed. It is easier to be successful when you print slower!

I am excited that my $169 3D printer is so fast. I don’t think I will be catching the Prusa MK4’s 17-minute Benchy, and it sure seems like this would be an achievable goal, but I am more than happy enough to be ahead of the Sovol SV07’s 25-minute Benchy!

How reliable is the Sovol SV06?

I don’t think the Sovol SV06 has even existed long enough to decide whether or not it will be a reliable 3D printer. I have friends that bought some of the first Prusa MK2 printers, and they are still functioning printers. I bought my Prusa MK3S nearly three years ago, I have put dozens of spools of filament through it, and I have never done any sort of maintenance or repairs. Unless you count upgrading the PEI sheet or switching to a 0.6mm CHT-style nozzle.

Bender

I am a sample size of just one. The first thing I printed was a gold and silver silk PLA MINI 13 Bender scaled up to 300%. He took about 36 hours to print over the course of four or five days. This gave me a good bit of confidence in my new printer.

What about the Sovol SV06 Plus?

I got to visit one of these last week when my neighbor bought one. It looks like a bigger version of my printer, and it even includes a few nice little upgrades.

Everything gets trickier when the bed gets bigger, and the 310 mm square bed of the Sovol SV06 Plus is well up into that range where things can get tricky. Any errors in bed leveling are exaggerated and compounded. My neighbor seems to be having good luck, but I would only recommend choosing the SV06 Plus if you actually have a need to print things that won’t fit on the Sovol SV06.

Sovol has done an amazing job on their extruder

The extruder assembly that Sovol is using on the SV06, SV06 Plus, and SV07 is fantastic. You can replace the entire thing in about 30 seconds, and you can order a new assembly from Sovol for $55. It includes the heater, the entire hot end, the extruder motor, and all the gears. Everything is assembled and ready to print. And unlike on the Prusa MK3, the Sovol extruder includes a silicon sock!

The Sovol SV06 has a smaller heater and nozzle, while the SV06 Plus and SV07 have a larger heater module with a volcano-style nozzle. As far as I know, the nicer setup from the SV06 Plus will bolt right onto my smaller SV06. You just need to dial the new Z-offset in and run a PID tune.

They're the same printer

The low price and ease of swapping out the entire assembly is awesome. If something goes wrong and you wind up with a big blob of filament melted onto your extruder, you can pay $55 to order a new extruder, then spend 5 minutes swapping it out.

It isn’t perfect, but it is a well thought out design. It has a 10-to-1 reduction gear, and the distance from the drive gear to the hot end is quite small. Even though it comes with a tiny pancake stepper motor, this extruder has a lot of power, and that short path for the filament makes it quite good when printing flexible materials.

The only real bummer is that those 4010 fans are undersized, underpowered, and the part-cooling fan is in a terrible location. Don’t get me wrong! They do the trick at normal printing speeds, but they aren’t going to get you to a 20-minute Benchy!

I have heard that Sovol’s extruder is a pain in the neck if you do manage to get filament stuck inside. I haven’t had this happen yet, but I will be sure to let everyone know how it goes when it eventually DOES happen!

The Sovol SV07 isn’t an upgrade from the Sovol SV06

Sovol’s naming convention is dumb. It seems like every time they come out with a new printer, they increment the number. There is even a random dual-extruder machine in the middle of the lineup. It doesn’t make a lot of sense.

The Sovol SV06 is built like a Prusa MK3S+. It has the same sort of linear-rod setup. The layout is similar. They both use the same sort of induction probe for bed leveling. Sovol even tweaked Marlin just enough for you to use your existing Prusa MK3 slicer profiles with the SV06 and SV06 Plus.

The Sovol SV07 is an Ender 3 clone with a Klipper screen bolted on. Aside from that Klipper upgrade, the machine feels like it is taking several steps backwards. It uses v-wheels instead of linear bearings. The bed rides on a single piece of aluminum extrusion. They even added back bed-leveling wheels like we used to have to use six years ago. So many steps backward.

Even so, Maker’s Muse says the Sovol SV07 produces clean prints at lightning speed. His 25-minute TPU Benchy is a good indicator that Sovol has designed a fantastic extruder.

Conclusion

I think the Sovol SV06 is an amazing printer at its price point. It has most of the features have that made my Prusa MK3S such a joy to use over the last three years, but the Sovol cost me less than a quarter of the price of the Prusa.

You definitely need to be aware of what you are giving up when you save $800 here. The printer from Prusa will almost definitely work when you open the box, and if it doesn’t, Prusa’s customer service department will respond to you pretty quickly. If you have bad luck with your Sovol, you might have to source your own replacement parts to get things going in a timely manner. If you told me Sovol’s entire customer service department was just one part-time employee that calls in sick most of the time, I would believe you!

How many broken printers is Sovol shipping? In reality, it probably isn’t all that many, but I am afraid to take a guess on a percentage. You are way more likely to see people with problems posting on Reddit. We have no idea how many people are having success out of the box, but I suspect it is almost everyone.

My real conclusion

I would still absolutely recommend that you buy a Sovol SV06. You just have to understand the risks and what you are giving up when going with one of the cheapest options. The Sovol SV06 is by far my favorite printer under $750. The risks seem fairly low to me, and the Sovol SV06 punches way above its $250 price point.

I do have one important recommendation. Please don’t immediately take apart your brand new Sovol SV06 to grease the bearings. You probably don’t need to, and you should most definitely make sure you new printer is functional before you start tearing it apart!